Within any large organization, over the span of many years the organization often finds itself with a sprawling IT infrastructure that encompasses a variety of different computer hardware, operating-systems, and application software. Although each individual component of such infrastructure might itself be well-engineered and well-maintained, when attempts are made to interconnect such components, or to share common resources, it is often a difficult administration task. In recent years, organizations have turned their attention to technologies such as virtualization and centralized storage, and even more recently cloud computing, which can provide the basis for a shared infrastructure. However, there are few all-in-one platforms that are particularly suited for use in such environments.
Session state can be used in the middleware machine platform for storing important user session information. A middleware machine system can replicate session state associated with user service request from one server instance to another server instance using Remote Method Invocation (RMI), in order to prevent the loss of user session information when one server instance fails. These are the generally areas that embodiments of the invention are intended to address.